I’ve been a Michael Moore fan since “Roger & Me” and I definitely enjoyed Sicko. As with anything Michael Moore does, you take him with a grain of salt and you have to be very aware of his agenda.

I won’t get into much of a critique of Michael Moore’s stance (obviously, he thinks nationalized health care works and basically made a whole movie showing why our system is broken and why other systems work).

In any case, Moore continues to be funny and outrageous. My favorite anecdote he gives is when he talks about how the government will actually go to your house and do your laundry in France and at one point he attempts to take his laundry to Washington to do the same in the states.

In all seriousness, though, the American system is broken and Moore is sure to make you pissed off at the government and keep you laughing while he fans the flames of your anger. If you’re going to watch a left wing propaganda film, you may as well watch an entertaining one.

I put a candle as the graphic for this review as a memorial for everyone who died and is dying today for lack of medical care. Sadly enough, I am among those who are ill and require extensive medical care that I cannot afford. While I do receive most of my medication, there are many I cannot get access to because of the changes in the Medicare program and that joke they call Medicare Part D prescription plan. What good is a prescription plan when one cannot get access to life-saving medications?

In the United States, it is illegal for anyone to commit murder or for a person to commit suicide. It is illegal for anyone to assist another in committing suicide. If you do not believe me, ask Dr. Kevorkian who is in prison now for helping terminally ill, suffering people who want to end their lives.

The United States, as proven by Michael Moore’s documentary SICKO, is guilty of genocide, suicide, and homicide by proxy. Without access to healthcare, medication, and proper education the United States will fall. Already, this country is falling behind in educating our youth, caring for our sick, disciplining children, and the jails are full of people who never had the opportunity for a life.

I have a hereditary eye disease that leaves me legally blind in addition to problems with my optic nerves. This is a problem I did not cause nor did I want. I have two autoimmune diseases, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjogren’s Disease. I have joint disease as a result of the autoimmune diseases as well as severe arthritis. My husband has juvenile diabetes and is insulin-dependent. Each time he or I contact a healthcare salesperson, the moment one of us mentions diabetes, lupus, or eye disease the line goes dead. The healthcare insurance salesperson hands up the phone. We are collateral damage just as many other citizens in our country.

In this day and age, there is no reason why anybody should have to choose between housing, utilities, groceries, medication, and the right to live yet it happens every day in this country and I am sick of it.

I commend Michael Moore for bringing this subject to the front lines where everyone can see what is truly happening to this country. What good is “the United States having the best technological advances in the world” when nobody except the richest of the rich can afford it? This country is long overdue for a revolution.

It is time for the American public to demand our congressional leaders get off their backsides and begin doing their jobs to make this a country of, by, and for the people. It is time we tell congress and the White House Administration in one voice, “WE DEMAND UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE! WE DEMAND ACCESS TO REASONABLE MEDICATION! WE DEMAND ACCESS TO EDUCATION!”

As Americans, this is OUR country and it is time we take it back from the greedmongers who are corrupting this country and killing its citizens by refusing to allow access to education and healthcare. The buck has to stop somewhere. I only hope SICKO will shake this country out of apathy and make the public think about what we deserve and what we can have if only we stand together and demand it.

Watch SICKO. I highly recommend it. However, be warned you will need tissues to cry for the ones who died and are dying. You will need a pillow to scream into or a baseball bat with a pole or punching bag somewhere to vent the frustration and anger at a government that cares more for lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies and healthcare insurance agencies than the public who put them into office.

Joseph Goebbels famously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” So it came as no surprise that the greatest socialist propagandist of our generation, Michael Moore, would continue to tell the “Big Lie” that we would all be better off if we just gave up “evil” capitalism for good and drank the communist Kool-aid. No, “Sicko” is not a biopic about the infamous director (although I still insist that his book “Stupid White Men” is autobiographical), but a man that continues to manipulate and distort the facts while attempting to pass himself off as a legitimate documentarian is truly sick indeed. In the beginning of Sicko, we are promised by Mr. Moore that the film wouldn’t be about the approximately 50 million Americans without health care (yet another lie) and then he proceeded to go around to various countries and attempt to show how much better they have it than Americans with socialized medicine. To be fair, I did see one thing in this film that I agreed with. In the final credits, Moore included a wonderful quote by Alexis de Tocqueville: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” And as if to add more credibility to these words, Mr. Moore reminds us that Tocqueville was French. Of course, the truly enlightened in every country understand that the way to repair faults is with less government intervention in our lives not more. And since Mr. Moore is shameless when it comes to selling out to the French (ostensibly to win another Palme d’Or) and quoting dead Frenchmen, let me use this opportunity to quote another dead Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat: “Who would not like to see all these benefits flow forth upon the world from the law, as from an inexhaustible source? But is it possible? Where does (the government) draw those resources that it is urged to dispense by way of benefits to individuals? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How, then, can these resources be increased by passing through the hands of a parasitical and voracious intermediary?” Bastiat also popularized what is known as the Broken Window Fallacy, the idea that there are hidden costs associated with purposely breaking windows (among other things) so that a certain segment of society (i.e. glassworkers) can gain from it. Never has a film been more deluded by the Broken Window Fallacy than Sicko. Just listen to Moore gush about how the French get free laundry service from the government! There are no hidden costs there, right? And these “necessary” perks are not available in the US because Americans are the most selfish, uncaring people on the earth, right? So this filmmaker would have you believe. Consider how he portrays a woman being tossed out of a health care facility like refuse. He conveniently fails to mention that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act it is illegal to refuse people emergency service due to their inability to pay for it, but why bother to state the facts when depicting human suffering is such effective propaganda? Furthermore, if these catastrophic events are really occurring and bodies are piling up in the streets, why doesn’t Mr. Moore do something about it immediately?! I know it’s hard to give up such a lavish lifestyle, but perhaps he could forego riding in chauffeured limousines (maybe even skip a few meals?) at least until this “disaster” is averted. So delusioned by his Robin Hood approach to save the world from capitalism and oblivious to the true cost of socialism, Moore interviews residents of Cuba about the “great” benefits of universal health care and how cheap it is (more broken windows). No mention about how under law 88, any dissent whatsoever would get these Cubans up to 15 years in prison. This would be like asking a slave if he was being treated well right in front of his master. One of the Cubans Moore interviews happens to be Aleida Guevara. No mention, of course, that her father Che was an ardent socialist and mass murderer who executed thousands. The irony was apparently lost on Moore. Of course, the genocide in Latin America pales in comparison to the atrocities perpetrated in places like Russia, China, and Cambodia in the 20th century. In fact, regimes calling themselves socialists have murdered over 100 million people since 1917. Millions more perished because their governments couldn’t feed them. These are the real, explicit costs of socialism that you will never see in a Michael Moore film. He seems to be more concerned with obscurantism and self-loathing than telling you the truth. The apex of Moore’s self-hatred comes at the point in the film where he dejectedly asks the audience, “Who are we? and what has happened to our soul?” So I will end this review by answering these questions. Just as far-left academians, politicians, and socialist filmmakers are conspiring to make us feel guilty for our vast wealth and telling us we are the most greedy and miserly group of people that ever lived, America has set an all-time record for charitable giving, donating more than 295 billion dollars last year, more than any civilization in the history of the world. Notice how that is not money taken by force and squandered by a parasitical and voracious intermediary (i.e. the IRS, socialist governments). But surely this must be a mistake becuase Mr. Moore is telling us that the French are so much more compassionate. Perhaps the French don’t produce as much as the evil Americans who profit on the backs of the poor and we should check the amount of donations relative to a country’s wealth. How much then, did these countries give as a percentage of their gross domestic product? That would be 1.7% for the Americans and a whopping 0.14% for the French. So much for Mr. Moore telling us how selfish we are in relation to the rest of the world, especially the French. Could it be that this filmmaker is so deluded by utopian dreams of a society with the basic principle: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (as quoted directly from Karl Marx by a French doctor in Sicko) that he is willing to deceive his audiences to achieve it? After all, the end justifies the means, right? Fortunately, the majority of Americans are not fooled. They understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch (neither free healthcare nor free laundry service) and that the society that Mr. Moore wants us all to have in reality would make everyone equally poor. And so it is that Mr. Moore has discovered a powerful medium (film) and means (deceitful propaganda) to achieve his desired end (socialism), just like those that came before him… wonderful people like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Guevara, and Castro. Thankfully, we are not all drinking the Kool-aid just yet.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I have a couple of family members who are always grappling with the vagaries of U.S. health care.

I, personally, have no insurance because I’m out of work. I’ve asked my insurance agent about individual health coverage, but because I’ve gone to the ER with chest pain once in the last 5 years, I was disqualified—in spite of the fact that the ER had ruled out any kind of cardiovascular disease or event as the cause.

So my only health coverage has been to cross my fingers and hope that nothing happens to me until I get married and my wife can put me on her policy. (I guess I also have to hope that her insurer won’t disqualify me for the same reason.)

OK I have to admit that for some reason I didn’t like Michael Moore. There was just something about him that I didn’t like. But this movie has changed my mind about him and now I respect him. He brought a very important topic to the eyes of moviegoers. His documentary was eye opening and made me question the way the health care system works in our country, and I hope this movie helps change that. This movie is a must see!

This is Michael Moore’s best documentary. Bowling for Columbine sort of annoyed me, Fahrenheit 911 insulted me, but this one is wonderful. Important, decent, true (it hurt—lots of incredulous laughter in the audience, including me). Much appreciated—bravo, sir.

I hope someone takes up more particularly the mental health care industry. There was a brief mention of sleeping pills and anxiety/ depression meds. prescribed when problems are obviously societal, i.e., major stress from having copious debt and worrying about not getting health care or being able to go to school or maybe losing a loved one in the war… instead of letting up on the factors that keep people from being “healthy, educated, and confident,” they get pills to ignore it. People are really hurting, and it doesn’t have to be that bad. Frustrating for a therapist.

I live in Sweden, a country that’s hailed by George W. Bush as the forefront of success when it comes to privatising social security. The country in question is also hailed by Osama Bin Laden for its dedication to neutrality.

We have what in the USA is known as universal health-care, i.e. we pay for our health-care merely by paying taxes. Medicines cost a bit, but not very much (except for specials).

This might change, though. Our current government would love to be able to sell every single hospital to private companies, corporations and consortiums.

In the USA, everybody willing to seek health-care needs to fend for her or his self by paying – lots. Michael Moore shows a bit of the reality that more than 50 million Americans face: living without health insurance.

A guy lops off two tips of his fingers and needs to have them put back, but one costs $12,000 and the other a lot more [I can’t remember the exact number, but something like $30,000 isn’t improbable]. He chose the one that cost less, and ended up having to pay that obscene amount of money.

And so the stories go, throughout the film. Detainees in Guàntanamo Bay get universal health-care, but not Americans. So Moore takes three people who helped out in New York during 2001-09-11 to Cuba, where they’re instantly helped. They’re diagnosed, get help and medication; where one person pays $120 for a bottle of medicine at home, she pays 5 cents (!) for it in Cuba. Think about it.

And we’re shown basically the same thing in France and England. And in Canada, we’re shown that Americans who need health-care at times end up marrying Canadians just to get universal health-care. Radiant.

The health-insurance companies are slammed as the money-grubbing, corporate )&€

All in all, this is much needed film that shows us what happens when a small elite earn a LOT of money from doing something they can do when they abuse their power, and the rest – i.e. the people – suffer.

I think everyone should see this movie, everyone I know in the whole world. So that you can think about what needs to be done to help the U.S. come CLOSE to living up to its own propaganda about being the greatest country in the world, or so you can take a moment to be grateful for all that you have and to make sure those rights aren’t taken for granted or taken away from you.

I feel like I’d have to be crazy to move back to the States, with things the way they are, without knowing how I can change the system.